DrTy2

This is just carbohydrates craving, some say it's due to a yeast overgrowth... I don't believe that very much, I think it's mostly how the hypothalamus-amigdala interaction caused by low blood carbohydrates levels/CCK/insulin release, changes from person to person. To some people it's an urge wich cannot be contained, much like some people are very much prone to dependencies compared to others. I myself am almost immune to any kind of serious dependency (smoke, marijuana, psychological, alcohol, chocolate, coffee, etc), but I suffer of strong craving when I do not eat regularily.

Looks like your blood pressure is very low, probably due to a strong vago-vagal stymulation effect. I've experienced this kind of debilitating crush myself quite a bunch of times, sometimes I even had syncopes during attacks, with my hands becoming completely numb.

Great finding, my most sincere gratitude!

1- I don't think so. Occam razor suggests me that years of cortisone treatments could be the cause instead. 2- Yes, because of cortisone, probably. Still if you already suffer from an articular disease, the excess of stress your body endures during clusters, will probably worsen it tough. 3- There are some new researches pointing out how Psilocybin and LSD could possess anti-inflammatory properties, so yes, they could help ease the pain. 4- No real scientific studies here, but given the large amount of herbs there and what they're supposed to do, well, yes, it could be. Would be interesting to hear from someone who's testing it. 5- Microdosing is somewhat different from taking a drug under your tongue. Sub-lingual administration is a way to ensure wide bioavailability of a drug, so it's actual blood level may even be higher than ingesting a larger dose.

I knew that. My grand-grandfather, who suffered from CH (I inherited it from him), had a surgery later in the years, to get his trigeminal nerve removed (not with radiofrequencies, yet the final effect is the same). Guess what? After 1 year of relief, CH came again just as usual. He suffered by a lot of additional issues also, like loss of sensitivity on that side of the face, difficulties during mastication, etc. For me it's 100% useless, for other people... who knows, but I won't bet on that.

I need to know more before expressing my opinion: dosage (wich varies wildly among CH patients), therapy lenght, how old are you, and other pathologies you may have. Feel free to PM me, if you want more privacy, or we can talk here if you want to share your situation with the other users. It's also very important to know if you started your therapy dosage gradually, and if you reduced them gradually or abruptly: Verapamil, cortisone, and Levetiracetam all require progressive dosing in and out. Also I need a more detailed description of the joint pains: are they constant or episodic? Do they worsen under mechanical stress? Do you have prickling, feeling of electric discharges, loss of senistivity on fingertips, nerve pain? Levetiracetam itself does not provoke joint/bone pain, just very rarely myalgia, nor does Verapamil itself, expecially if you stopped taking it 6+ months ago. Cause could be Cortisone, but there could be another uninvestigated additional disease, wich steroids may have worsened, for example ostheoporosys, diabetes or gout.

As I've told you: antibiotic and anti-inflammatory properties. Wich, more or less, is what most "healing" remedies do, except this one has also strong cytotoxic properties, together with powerful immuno-stymulant (and immuno-modulant) properties (thus it's an anti-cancer remedy). How that could be responsible for CH pain relief, expecially with so much rapidity, still it's completely out of my reach. I don't think anamu is the answer we're looking for, probably it's just helping out the other herbs, but it's defintely worth a try to test it alone.

My experience is just the opposite instead. The more I force myself on living a regular lifestyle, with fixed hours to eat, sleep, wake up, have sex etc, the more it helps with clusters. With some clusters I had back in the past, even just going to bed 1 hour later, or skipping a meal, could trigger devastating backfire K9 CH strikes, with shadows that could keep lingering for days. Sometimes a DST time change midway-through a subsiding cluster, worsened it to the point it got back to starting point again, increasing its overall lenght. About overall cycle durations... well, they do the fuck they want, no matter what. And many times, expecially in the last 6-7 years, when the cycle seem to be gone, they just go dormant for a few days, up to a week or two, just to come back with a vengeance.

In fact, the original poster educately asked if other CHers got their clusters triggered and/or worsened by DST, to see how many people do suffer because of that, that's it. It's still very interesting to see all kind of repetitive patterns among the patients, as they're always hindsights for additional etiology explanations. And, on top of that, it totally makes sense that there are many clusters triggered by that, as circadian rhytm is involved in CH, even if not for all of us (at least on a measurable level). That's the reason why most CH fire at the same time every day/night, start in the same season, etc etc. Your's different? Random and chronics are different? Well, there's nothing strange in that. Maybe there are additional malformations/genetic variations/underlining diseases that modify CH, or some of them jsut degenerate, or change with age. Or they're just worsened by climate, world region, race (are we all male white caucasians here?), temperature, weather conditions, lifestyle, nutrition. Believe me, except than for maybe infections, most genetic diseases vary quite a lot from patient to patient: there's no absolute or universal "epyleptic" or "schizophrenic" patient for example, and I've seen a lot of different patterns for celiac disease, to the point that many researchers are starting to think to furtherly differentiate them in more categories. Any information is useful, being it positive (yes, DST crappity smack me up), or negative (no, DST don't crappity smack me up), or just partially positive/negative (yes, DST crappity smacked me up in the past, but it doesn' crappity smack me up since 10 years).

You should wait for other "more experienced" users answer, as I've heard that cortisone may increase the hallucinogenic effect of mushrooms, and may cause a "bad trip", as it has an intrinsecally depressive effect on your mood. Other than that, and the fact that busting could be simply ineffective (steroids are listed among the "Sure Blockers"), there are no specific clinical counter-indications on mixing cortisone and shrooms. Waiting at least 5 days, and taking a slightly lower dose, is still recommended tough. Btw: depakote is sodium valproate, it's not a steroid, but it will require days to be fully detoxed. I have zero faith on valproate's effectiveness on CH tough, so my advice is just to detox from steroids, and never start Depakote at all (unless you have another pathology, like epilepsy, going on that requires it).

You change all your daily rhytms. You eat, go to sleep, wake up, and even flush your toilet one hour later or earlier. So no, it's not bullshit. It's just a kick in your omeostasis metaphoric nuts, and when all circadian rhytms are screwed up, the one who's called out first to share all your body faults it's the hypothalamus itself.

1- do not stop cortisones abruptly, ever. Do not do that for any reason whatsoever. Reduce them slowly as prescribed, and keep in mind that they will stay in your body for days, weeks, sometimes even months, expecially if you're using a sustained release form. 2- In my experience, a heavier initial dose of mushrooms works better than a small one. The stronger you hit it, the better. 3- Many people report that cortisone inhibits Mushrooms effectiveness, but I've never experienced it so I can't tell. Just keep in mind that the "5 days"Â rule is probably not enough with cortisone, I would say that at least 2 weeks is the minimum time required. Yet, you can still try to get some benefits, even if you can't bust it completely. 4- There is no "fixed" dose: YMMV. It depends on mushroom quality, strain, sub-specie etc. Usually an hallucinogenic dose is not required, but at least for me, I do vastly prefer to do a full trip to kick the beast in the ass.

I've just read the article: it's really great, and all the scientific/medical statements are quite correct! Thank you, because I really enjoyed reading it through!

Just a few cents thrown in there coming from my very general knowledge of pharmaceutical botanics: 1- Many, many herbs do possess antiseptical/antibiotics properties. That's because these substances are more or less some kind of "immune system" of most plants: they actually passively prevent microorganisms from over-proliferating. So it's not unusual at all to find herbs whose properties are to be preservants, and/or antiseptics of some kind. Some studies back in the past, suggested how many migraines (including CH), were provoked, in some individuals, by yeasts or other patogens widespread colonization through the body (like candida), and expecially in the digestive system. So any kind of herb wich may help re-equilibrate natural bacterial/fungine flora, may help against headaches, at least in some individuals. 2- If some recipes tell you to let them ferment, they're actually extracting some active principles with alcohol: it's just natural alcohol produced by the bacteria/yeasts/fungi. Other than that, what really matters, is the way the active substance is carried through the medium. For what we know, this could even be completely irrelevant, and just chewing or swallowing these herbs could be enough. 3- The more I read about it, the more it says "sexual hormones replacement/regulation therapy". Another option is instead of just trying one herb after the other, you can try to remove just ONE herb from the "potion" and see if it still works, and then remove each one of them until you see some difference, in order to see wich one of them do really synergize.

Yes, Daylight saving time (DST) or summer time, and law time, or whatever you call it (when you change your time 1 hour ahead or forward), always messes with my CH, or can even trigger it to start. CH is all about circadian rhythms, so that's quite predictable.

About Basil... well in Italy basil (we call it "basilico") is a very common spice used for cooking. I ate tons of basil since I was a child, and I still eat it even fresh in significant quantities, so well, no. It's not basil that cures CH! About the opportunity of synergic effects well... It could be, but it's an alcoholic extract, so my educated guess is that they're not interacting very much among themselves, it's probably something included in more than one herb, that has more or less a similar effects on the body. So, it's worth trying one by one, at least we could define important parameters like: 1- If there's just one herb wich is working, and the rest is just there for the show 2- If there's one or more herbs working a little, but they're much more powerful when combined 3- If no single herb is working at all, and we need a special sinergy. Then the next step should be testing it on various CH individuals and see on how many of them it works, and start to define a pattern, i.e. if all of them do respond to D3 treatment, if their testosterone levels are all normal, if they're refractory to other treatments etc.

Actually didgens nailed it: there's no way to understand what's workin, unless we start taking them one by one. Trying to give an explanation in a concotion of 10+ herbs, is really like finding a needle in an haystack.

I copy-paste my answer from my other topic here as well: I actually read through that Mamajuana article already, and the only idea I had it is that this concotion is some kind of hormonal replacement therapy, as most of the herbs included possess effects that are quite clearly imputable to sexual hormones activity. Alcohol itself is probably required to extract the active ingredients from the herbal products (in other words it's an alcoholic extract), wich is quite reasonable, as many hormones are quite idrophilic, but still very much lipophilic at the same time, so alcohol it's probably the best chemical to extract them. There are some recent studies pointing out how testosterone supplementation may help subside CH pain for a very short period: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16732838 This could also explain why having an active sexual life may help reducing CH attacks (not the orgasm thing tough, that's probably due to the massive oxytocin vascular effect). So all in all Mamajuana activity could be related to the male hormones it contains, or because it helps your body produce/regulate them, much like soy milk/extracts help women reduce menopausal side-effects. Also it could explain why its effect is so much short-term, as it only helps easing the pain momentarily, but then hormones are very rapidly metabolized and eliminated from the system in just a couple of hours.

I actually read through that Mamajuana article already, and the only idea I had it is that this concotion is some kind of hormonal replacement therapy, as most of the herbs included possess effects that are quite clearly imputable to sexual hormones activity. Alcohol itself is probably required to extract the active ingredients from the herbal products (in other words it's an alcoholic extract), wich is quite reasonable, as many hormones are quite idrophilic, but still very much lipophilic at the same time, so alcohol it's probably the best chemical to extract them. There are some recent studies pointing out how testosterone supplementation may help subside CH pain for a very short period: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16732838 This could also explain why having an active sexual life may help reducing CH attacks (not the orgasm thing tough, that's probably due to the massive oxytocin vascular effect). So all in all Mamajuana activity could be related to the male hormones it contains, or because it helps your body produce/regulate them, much like soy milk/extracts help women reduce menopausal side-effects. Also it could explain why its effect is so much short-term, as it only helps easing the pain momentarily, but then hormones are very rapidly metabolized and eliminated from the system in just a couple of hours.

Hi, I'm a doctor, and I'm sorry to tell you that Arnold-Chiari malformation is herniated cerebellum, and so it's quite unrelated to Cluster headaches. Your pain is due to mechanical compression of confining nervous system regions, and it's not caused by a metabolic disorder such as in Clusters. The reasons why opiates are not working is probably due to the fact that they increase endocranial pressure, thus they're probably aggravating your condition. There's a distinct counterindication on using opiates on pathologies like yours, so I can't tell if there are some unknown clinical reasons behind this prescription, or if just your doctor doesn't know enough about your specific malformation. Also he prescribed you Quetiapine (Seroquel) for maniac disorders, wich is completely unrelated to pain, but rather to psychiatric conditions, so my best guess is that you need to see aneurologist rather than a psychiatrist for your problems My advice is to suggest him about taking osmotic diuretics to reduce your cranial internal pressure, and/or an additional forced ventilation regimen with different oxygen pressures, until you find the one that best suits you. That's the best I can do, if you send me your case history I may try to give some more helpful hints, but sadly, that's not my field of specialization I do really wish you best luck man!

Looks like you suffer not from CH, but rather from Paroxysmal Hemicrania, wich by the way, was in the past considered the femminile version of the CH, as it almost only affects female patients. Its responsiveness to Indometacin treatment gives me further confirmation of that, together with the worsening during phisical exercises (wich is typical of most migraine attacks). Ask your neurologist for a differential diagnosys, or check a better specialized one. I can't give you the link to wikipedia page, because the forum prevents me from doing so, but just check on google for Femminile Paroxysmal Hemicrania (you probably got a Chronic version in your "hell year").

Hi, I am an Italian Clusterhead, suffering from both CH and common migraine for 17+ years. First of all I'd wish to thank you all for the great amount of informative data I've found here, and the great dedication each one of you showed to keep up this great community I've just discovered. I devoted most of my life to studying the CH pathology, and I've become a true doctor a few years ago: I'm an Hospital Pharmacist, wich is not the usual community pharmacist you see in the pharma-shops, rather a medical specialist, wich is more or less what's a Pharmacologist is outside Italy. So my thread here is both to share my experience, and to let everybody know that even if medicine knows quite little about CH and migraines, I am still here to advice and help anyone as best as I can, about everything you may wish to know like drug interactions, safety of other prescriptions, scientific news and such. Send me a private message, or write down here, and I'll try to answer as soon as possible: we're all cluster mates, so that's my precise duty to help with all my knowledge. I was a migraine kid, as I already had migraine attacks even when I was a small child (I probably had my first attack when I was 6-8 years old), and I started getting my first splitting CH attacks when I was 15-16 years old. I usually get 1-4 migraine attack per month, and 3-4 months of CH each year (usually 2 attacks during the day and 2 attacks during the night/early morning), plus an increased number of migraine attacks just before and just after the cluster itself (likely one per week or even more), with some kind of basilar migraine during the whole cluster (low dull pain, clouded head, constant nausea, impaired vision and so on). I've tried almost all the coping methods (except O2 because is almost impossible here to get the 100% flow one), and the only one wich gave me relief were water treatment (I drink up to 4-5 liters of water daily), phisical exercise (I was able to skip out 2 years of clusters through intense daily activity, but I had to get 30+lbs of muscles in the meanwhile, so I couldn't keep it up with it for my whole lifetime), and energy drinks (with very limited effects). Usually I manage CH with Verapamil (just Isoptin tough, the generic brands are much less effective) at a dosage ranging around 300-500mg/die, plus Metilprednisone (15-50mg daily for no more than 1-2 week, usually while I slowly build up Verapamil dosage). I can abort a migraine attack with Maxalt RPD 10mg (sub-lingual Rizatriptan), and CH strikes with Imigraine (Sumatriptan: I found that half a syringe is enough most of the time), but I do very, very rarely use this last one (I usually "man out" the pain with ice, cold, screaming, punching the wall and biting a wet towel). I recently tried to "bust out" the pain with a very strong dried wild Psilocybe Serbica (Bohemica) batch (with due induction, a 1.2 dose is enough to get powerful psichedelic effects, and with 1.8 grams they sent me on a monstrous trip through the ancestral memories of the human race, aliens, and past lives for 6+ hours ). My first bust (5 doses, once each 5 days) wasn't successful, because I discovered the method when I was already halfway through the CH, so I was already under Verapamil and Sumatriptan treatment (and I didn't yet knew about the triptanes interaction, so I messed it up a bit). I couldn't truly bust it out because of the above reasons, but they greatly helped me through one of the most devastating and unexpected clusters of my life. I had the slapbacks and all the "side effects" (wich by the way, I truly love, as they changed my view on life and they vastly improved my memory and overall mental acuity), but I got a lot of pain relief, so when the next cluster come up 2 months ago, I decided to give mushrooms another chance, this time without any other drugs interfering (nothing at all). Before the cluster itself stikes, I usually notice an increased frequency of migraine attacks, so as soon as I saw the "pattern", I took a solid dose of shrooms (1.3), and they immediately stopped all migraine attacks from the day after, and removed the daily "veil of fog" I had on my brain. 2 weeks later the cluster truly manifested itself, and I got another smaller dose (1.2), and even with small slapbacks in the next 2-3 days, I managed to live it out pain-free for another 2 weeks with just 2 additional doses (1.0 and 0.8 once per week). I don't know if the cluster is truly busted, but up to today I had no true CH attacks, no real significant pain, no morning cold pain showers, and no nighties: just a couple of mid-sized migraine attacks (wich I had to endure without Rizatriptan), and some small "electric bursts" through the head during the usual daily cluster hours. As per day 31 since the first cluster signs, I had no need to take Verapamil, wich for me, is a great success, even if I would later need to take it, if shrooms should not prove to be enough.